"But you are so tired, you—"
She was interrupted. There were muffled, flying footsteps on the stairs, and a shabby little man ran furtively into the room, shut the door behind him, and set his back against it. His face was mottled like a colored map, thick lines of perspiration shining across the splotches.
"Joe," he panted, "I've got Nashville good, and he's got me good, too;—I got to clear out. He's fixed me good, damn him! but he won't trouble nobody—"
Joe was across the room like a flying shadow.
"QUIET!" His voice rang like a shot, and on the instant his hand fell sharply across the speaker's mouth. "In THERE, Happy!"
He threw an arm across the little man's shoulders and swung him toward the door of the other room.
Happy Fear looked up from beneath the down-bent brim of his black slouch hat; his eyes followed an imperious gesture toward Ariel, gave her a brief, ghastly stare, and stumbled into the inner chamber.
"Wait!" Joe said, cavalierly, to Ariel. He went in quickly after Mr. Fear and closed the door.
This was Joseph Louden, Attorney-at-Law; and to Ariel it was like a new face seen in a flash-light—not at all the face of Joe. The sense of his strangeness, his unfamiliarity in this electrical aspect, overcame her. She was possessed by astonishment: Did she know him so well, after all? The strange client had burst in, shaken beyond belief with some passion unknown to her, but Joe, alert, and masterful beyond denial, had controlled him instantly; had swept him into the other room as with a broom. Could it be that Joe sometimes did other things in the same sweeping fashion?
She heard a match struck in the next room, and the voices of the two men: Joe's, then the other's, the latter at first broken and protestive, but soon rising shrilly. She could hear only fragments. Once she heard the client cry, almost scream: "By God! Joe, I thought Claudine had chased him around there to DO me!" And, instantly, followed Louden's voice: